2024-25 | Sensory Subjectivities: Identities and Alterity in the Early Modern World
Sensory Subjectivities considers how identities and alterity were constructed in early modernity through sensorial experience. Sensoriality in the early modern world was often shaped by cross-cultural encounter and exchange, forged under conditions of colonial and economic expansion and often in sites of competing spiritualities. Sensorial experience is ephemeral, which demands new lines of inquiry and new methodologies.
This ongoing project consists of a partnership between Leah R. Clark (Kellogg/Oxford) with Anuradha Gobin at the University of Calgary, Canada and Helen Coffey at the Open University. It brings together an interdisciplinary international network of scholars (historians; art, music and literary historians) to identify new transdisciplinary methodological frameworks to address multisensorial experiences, encounters, and subjectivities. The project contributes to calls for decolonising by demonstrating the importance of the senses to retrieve knowledge about the realities of groups who often left little physical traces such as material culture or texts in the archives. Sensory Subjectivities thus considers the experiences of marginalised groups as well as those we have more historical information for, to give equal weight and agency to multiple subject positions.
The 2024 - 2025 iteration of this project included an online reading group, talks, and two workshops, run in collaboration with EMSE (Early Modern Sensory Experiences).
Please click here to access the Sensory Artefact Toolkit, developed as part of this project.
The toolkit is a work in progress and your feedback will help to support and improve this. Please complete a feedback form, and the linked consent form, if you have accessed the toolkit.
Please click here to access the participant information sheet.
Sensory Artefact Toolkit
This toolkit is intended to be a starting point to think about subjectivities and positionality when looking at historic artefacts, to be used in teaching, research and knowledge exchange. The exercises are intended as prompts to think with—they can and should be adapted to your particular case study. The process is as important as the final outcome. This was put together by an interdisciplinary team of early modern scholars, working across music, history, art history, and archaeology. We use ‘artefacts’ loosely, and these activities could easily be adapted for any historic artefact, including ephemeral practices or experiences such as processions or singing as well as spaces.
The toolkit is composed of three main areas: I) a mapping exercise II) a positionality statement exercise II) creative activities that might be done in conjunction with I & II.
The order in which you do the toolkit is also entirely up to you, but it is important to emphasise that the positionality exercise (II) is a crucial and ethical component of this sort of methodology–you might find it useful to look at that in conjunction with the mapping exercise (I). We have been inspired by the work of Saidiya Hartman and others who have underscored how historic methods can often perpetuate the violence of the archive–this toolkit asks you to pause, to think more deeply about the methods we use as historians, and be attentive to the risks of perpetuating that violence or those power relationships. There is a bibliography at the end of the toolkit, which might help you navigate some of these bigger and difficult questions.
This is a work in progress—the toolkit will only get better through thoughtful feedback from those who have used it. If you’d like to submit your feedback, please fill out the feedback form here and complete a consent form and ensure you have read the participant information sheet, which details what we will do with your feedback/data.
How to cite this toolkit:
Sensory Artefact Toolkit, co-designed by the Sensory Subjectivities working group: https://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/sensory-subjectivities-identities-and-alterity-in-the-early-modern-world#tab-4566401
